First Car Payment

Last month I bought a car! I wanted a newer car and a more reliable one than my Lumina. My Lumina needs $1000 or so worth of repairs to the engine so I went to a dealer and got a new one. I did not think I would ever qualify, but after an online chat I went to Toyota Lithium in Abilene and ended up qualifying. I did need my dad to co-sign it with me and to my surprise he qualified. Due to the bankruptcy I wasn't expecting it to but 6 years have passed so it went through. I'm paying $235.40 each month for 66 months, or 5.5 years, and it includes a $200 deductible for the first 24,000 miles so if anything goes wrong I can go in to the dealer and pay $200 and they will pay the rest and fix it. It also includes the oil changes for the life of the loan. The car is a red Chevrolet Aveo LT and its a 2011 so it's such a good deal. The car was on sale for $9995. It had started out at $12000 and went down to $10,500 and they had taken it down to the price I purchased it at. I love the car and its a cute little compact car. I love it! The payments are due each month on the 25th but inset up a monthly recurring online payment for the 11th of each month, and it takes about a day to be processed, so around the 11or 12 of each month the payment will be taken automatically from my bank account. Today I officially paid the first payment on my car! yay! It feels so good and so grown up you know? only 65 more to go!

Ice and Snow World

     Today I went to the 2012 Harbin Ice and Snow World Festival! my camera batteries died as soon as I got there, so I had to use my Itouch to take pics, and that battery died on me a few minutes before I left. but I still got some decent shots, and it made me think about sometimes, when we go somewhere, we spend so much of our time making sure we get pictures, that we take pictures, that we do not always take memories; we dont always allow ourselves to simply BE THERE. if you guys want to see those pics, just let me know and I'll email them to you guys.

    It WAS SOOO AWESOME!!!  I cannot even do it justice in words or in pictures. they had this awesome Harbin Beer bottle, and a Coke bottle, and Cinderella's castle, and lots of the buildings had icy slides down them(which I did not do-it was freezing out, so that was not gonna happen). they had lots of chinese architercture buildings, and they had this cool bridge and a small maze. it was seriously cool! I thought it would be more crowded than it was. there were people there of course, but not the push through the crowds that i was expecting. then again, I did go at night, so I could see the lights, so maybe most people went during the day when it was warmer. and it is almost the end of the festival. still, it was cool! and...mind blowing. the whole time, I kept thinking "this is ice! this is what we use to warm our drinks! and here they have made life size buildings and sculptures out of it!" it makes me think about how you can make amazingly, stunningly beautiful things...out of the simplest things. like ice. ice is so simple, and yet look what can be done with it because people put the time, effort, and work into it. and once upon a time, the ice world was someone's crazy idea. one day someone had the idea of taking blocks of ice from the river and making an ice festival. and it became a world famous festival. maybe crazy ideas, aren't so crazy. maybe, if you work at it, and dedicate time and effort into it, the crasiest of ideas can become realities. after all, all the things we have today...they were once someone's crazy idea.

     they also had this European Show Theatre, and I just wandered into that building because I was cold, and thought maybe they had some displays or something, and i wanted to warm up a bit, and it turned out to be this theatre, and they had this awesome show! these beautiful dancers and magic acts...so amazing. I forgot how hot European guys can be.  and ive never seen guys dance like that before, so it was a cool show. and it was for free(well, it was problally included in the 300  yuan aka $50 for you living on the other side of the planet- price tag).

    i wish you guys could have been there! it wa sso amazing and marvelous. i was almost in shock the whole time, walkign around. because you keep thinking, these are all made of ice!!!

SO GLAD I WENT!!!

   

First Bread In My Bread Machine

Date Baked: Saturday August 6, 2011.
     This past Saturday my friend Anna and I decided to hang out. We rented a movie(The Switch) and made dinner: meatloaf, mash potatoes, and bread with nutella for dessert. now a few months ago I bought a bread machine, and I have not used it. mosty because it takes around 3-4 hours, and I don't like to leave stuff cooking/baking when I'm not in the apartment and no one else is at the apartment either. so it was tough to find a consecutive 3-4 hours that I would be able to stay in the apartment. so we decided to bake bread using my bread machine. we used the basic recipe for white bread. the manual comes with recipes of breads and jams(yes, it makes jams!) and the first one is basically a simple basic white bread recipe(delish though!) that is pretty much to get you familiar with your bread machine. I had forgotten to put in the blade in the bread pan, so when we had put in all the ingredients and hit start, nothing was happening. that's when we realzed the blade was not there, so we had to dump the ingrdiants and start all over. thankfully, we had more than enough of the ingrediants and it was a very basic recipe, so it didnt take too long to do it over again. however, it worked the second time(after we put the blade in)and it was cool seeing the bread kneaded, and punched, and rising, etc. the bread machine has a countdown and so you can see what is happening to the bread at specific time. it was really cool and really easy! the bread above is the bread that we made, 2 pound loaf, and it was delish! I dont have a bread knife, which made it tricky to cut but in the end, it was very delish and a lot of fun! I am glad I used my bread machine once before I leave for China, but I do kinda regret not using it more often before. when I come back though, totally will! no more buying bread!

1st Time Donation

I know that most people probably would not put their first time donating to a charm bracelet blog, or even an actual charm bracelet. however, this is my charm bracelet blog and I want to remember this day. I will be moving to Harbin, China for a year on August 25, and I decided that I'm going to take this opportunity to simplify; to get rid of all that stuff that I don't need and/or don't use anymore: like clothes that I know I will never wear or don't fit me anymore, or books that I have not read and know I won't read or have read maybe only once.
I thought that it was going to be hard. not the actually, physical part of it. I did know which books I would be donating. I knew which books I would never read, which ones I no longer have an interest in reading, and which ones I could live without. I thought that the hard would be in letting them go, in taking them to be donated and leaving them. anyone that knows me knows I am a bookworm in the worst possible way. I love books, I love reading, and the very idea of my getting rid of books is...surprising to myself. I always have believed that there is no such thing as too many books. I still believe that, but I suppose that now I believe there is no such thing as too many books that you actually do read. I realize that I don't want to have tons of books on my shelf that I do not read and which I know I will never read. which is why I love my kindle: I can store hundreds of books on my kindle which I know that I will most likely not be reading over and over again. and most of them are actually super cheap!collections of literature, like Shakespeare, Bronte family, Jane Austen, etc for $0.95 each! awesome deals! anyways, I did bag those books about a week or so ago, maybe a little longer but I did not take them to the donation center. mostly because I did not know where to donate them to, if there was a donation place in Abilene that took books and if so where it was. but this morning I just...decided to do it(and University Park's letting my know that I have to move out by the 19th instead of he 24th was a factor in that). I got some trash bags, and put the books I had bagged up in the larger bags, and added some more books as well. then I looked up goodwill Abilene, and I found a Goodwill donation Center(which is good because had I just gone to the goodwill store, that would have been awkward and time consuming), put the address on my Blackberry GPS and I was on my way! it's actually pretty close to where my storage unit is, which I find interesting. it was SO easy! I didn't even have to get out of the car! they have this black cord thing, and when a car drives over it it rings, and someone comes out from the office, and unloads your donations and you are on your way! they are even open on Sundays! it was so easy, and oddly enough, it wasn't as hard as I thought. I am actually...relieved to have given away those books that I do not read and never will, or have no interest in reading them anymore. it makes me feel a tiny bit...lighter. granted, my apartment doesn't look like I have done anything, but tomorrow I'm going to take some stuff to my storage unit, and that will hopefully make it feel like progress is being made. granted, a lot of the heavy stuff, like kitchen items, the microwave, appliances, etc. I can't put into storage into I move out on the 19th, but donating and storing things slowly will make it easier to pack for China and to move out.
donating was so easy and it really feels good to get rid of the excess. I am going to try to really...simplify. to start a simplified life style. I want to not have excess, to make sure that everything I have, I'm using: that I'm reading the books on my shelf, wearing the clothes and the shoes in my closet, using the appliances in my kitchen, using all the rooms in my apartment/house, etc. to me, this is a charm bracelet blog moment(cbbm for short!)

The Bracelet

I know, another blog?! yes, another blog. I had an idea for a blog that I think will be cool and good for me, and interesting for others to read. This blog is called Charm Bracelet, and it is a sort of virtual charm bracelet. the idea behind charm bracelets is that you add new charms.you can have a travel charm bracelet, and you add a new charm every time you go to a new place. or you can have a charm for every time something meaningful or special or interesting happens to you. you get the idea. so I thought, why not have a charm bracelet blog? a blog dedicated for special things that happen to me, for firsts, for weird things, for awesome things, etc? a virtual charm bracelet. I know I could do this as part of my main blog, my garden one, but that blog is slowly coming to be about my feelings, and  I think it's cool to have a blog that I can come to and read about cool stuff that's happened to me, or meaningful stuff, or even things that weren't so good. I do plan to write about meaningful things and sometimes meaningful things that happen are negative. I will keep it to good stuff for the most part though. I am very excited about this blog and I think it is such a good idea.